About

Cia. Lake Angela is a multimedia performance group with tributaries in poetry, dance, and translation. We choreograph and effect intersemiotic translations of poetry into nonverbal languages by moving among meaningful linguistic ambiguities. Our foremost concern is transforming. Now located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, we have performed frequently in Barcelona and Orange County, California. We continue to choreograph and perform in public spaces wherever possible. The company’s first performance premiered at the University of Texas, Dallas in 2015 as a feature-length translation of the poetry of Georg Trakl into dance. Recent live appearances include “Behind a shudder of clouds, they dip down, perform a murder, and go free…,” performed for NACHMO by Lake Angela and Kevin Richard Kaiser at Studio A Dance at Hyperion Arts in Los Angeles, and “Et benedictus fructus ventris tui,” performed by Lake Angela with members of Maha and Company at Found Theatre in Long Beach, CA. Video dances include “I Know You Choreograph Dead Bodies,” based on ideas and movements created by patients at a state hospital, and “Esokapi Mystika” and “Lagárbol” shot on location in Barcelona. Our work includes collaborations with dancer Renata Duran Grüninger, dancers with Maha and Company, and percussionist Snehal Desai.

Lake Angela is a poet, choreographer, and dancer from Lake Erie who constantly studies and develops her methods of dance as language. She currently works with psychiatric patients on discovering the transformative properties of dance as a therapeutic and accessible nonverbal language. Lake Angela studied choreography, modern dance, and ballet with Michele Hanlon and flamenco and rumba flamenca with Antonio and Delilah Arrebola in Dallas. In Barcelona, she continued her professional training in contemporary, release, improv, ballet, kung fu, and capoeira with Tragant Dansa, ESDM, Company & Company, Dao Kwon, and Capoeira Matumbé. In California, she trained with the Anaheim Ballet and choreographed and performed for Maha and Company of Long Beach. She taught for five years at the University of Texas at Dallas and later taught classes in composition and creation in Barcelona, where she is a member of the Association of Dance Professionals of Catalunya (APDC). She holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas for her intersemiotic translations of German Expressionist poetry into movement and has her MFA in poetry. Her full-length poetry collections, Organblooms (2020) and Words for the Dead (2021), are available from FutureCycle Press. Lake Angela’s special interests involve the poetry and dance of medieval women mystics, the possibilities in and kinds of darknesses and silences, and expressions of colors, waters, and suffering, which she often explores in her poems and choreography.

Kevin Richard Kaiser is a filmmaker, performer, musician, and writer from Orange County, California. His film production company, Ponokomita Productions, is the official videodance producer for Cia. Lake Angela. He has shot dance films on location in Barcelona and Orange County, California, as well as performed in Dallas and Los Angeles and composed and prepared music for performances and videos. Under Antonio and Delilah Arrebola, he studied and performed flamenco and rumba flamenca with Estudio Flamenco Dallas. His writing and music have been published or released internationally: in print, online, and on disc.

Jésica Cichero is a visual artist, illustrator, dancer, and creator from Argentina who has made her home in Barcelona. She is the co-creator of Entusiasta Gallery with her husband, artist David Pugliese. Lake Angela and Jésica began dancing together in 2016 in Barcelona, where they explore the creation of unusual movement in unusual places—in the bella ombra tree, the neighborhoods and streets, the playgrounds and dog beach, and in the Italian restaurant. They experiment with new ways to meld media, interacting through dance, painting, verbal languages in translation and nonsense translations, and through play as performance. Jési is Angela’s ideal dancer because she is both magical and inquisitive; since Jési naturally moves like a wave and Angela like a sharp piece of glass, they are good complements. Jési contributes a differently colorful perspective to the group’s dialogue, and her attitude is “my tango is your tango.” During their exploration sessions, Jési has created and performed such beautiful work as “dance inside the round mouth,” “Gorgon Dance,” and “Espagueti Western.”

Renata Duran Grüninger is an exquisite dancer who has dedicated her life to the development of dance. With a reputation as the German-Spanish-Catalan Marilyn Monroe, her biography is entitled Renata: the American Dream. Renata began her dance career at the age of five and completed her education at Centro de Educación Física Orthos in Barcelona, Iwanson Dance Center in München, Escuela de Danza Anna Maleras, and in courses with the most renowned dancers and choreographers in Spain, including her maestro, Máximo Hita. With specialties in modern, jazz, and contemporary and training in West African forms and ballet, Renata is a professor of dance and pilates at Estudio de Danza Tutuguri, Centro El Taller, and Casal de la Dona and has been an invited professor all over Spain, Germany, and São Paulo, Brasil. She has danced with the companies Cia. Roberto G. Alonso, Cia. Experiència Caracol·la, and Company Mucab Dance. Following Renata’s refined and glamorous methods of honing her dance ideas and perfecting her messages, Renata and Angela brew their collaborative ideas in the Barcelona café over many cups of café amb llet de soja. With the contribution of DJ Joan “El León” and Kevin Richard Kaiser, their work together also is known as Kaffeetanz. With working languages of German and gesture, their dances tend to reflect the experience of being foreign even at home.

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